So this is what happens when happycurtis and I just can't get enough of all the Quintis in Dam Breakthrough and the morning after ideas start flying (:
Happy woke up to an unnecessarily high-pitched, flowery alarm and groaned, wiping the sleep from her eyes. Her alarm was always set to the beeping of the default tone- she didn't see the point in wasting time changing tones as long as the default one did the job of waking her up. She groaned again, rubbing her eyes in sleepy frustration as she blindly patted her bedside table until she found the offending device.
"How the hell did the ringtone cha-" she started muttering to herself as she turned off the alarm, but stopped abruptly when she found herself staring at a photograph of her and Toby. In the university they went undercover at the previous week. Dancing.
She felt the mattress shift under her and a familiar voice yawning her name, and only then did the events of the past day come rushing back to her- her talk with Sylvester, everything with the dam, Megan's rocket, finally kissing Toby again, finally spending the night with Toby.
Happy turned to face him, eyes wide as her mind started functioning fully again and she realized that it was his phone she was holding. She took in Toby's sleepy smile but couldn't help turning back to his lock screen, carefully studying the photograph. The lighting was borderlining on cheesy with whatever filter Toby had used, but she just focused on her head on his chest and him smiling down at her, the pure adoration in his eyes intermixed with a twinge of surprise and disbelief.
It was then that she realized she hadn't felt so content and at peace since, well, forever.
A soft "Uh oh," came from behind her, and Happy turned back to see Toby watching her, expression sheepish yet hopeful as he waited for her reaction.
"I have so many questions right now," she said slowly and Toby nodded as he sat up against the headboard next to her, promising to tell her everything she wanted to know.
"Okay firstly, how did you even get this?"
"That's the good thing about youngsters doing so much illegal stuff- universities have to watch every square inch of the grounds. Sucks for the kids though, I remember when I was in Harv…" he trailed off at the pointed look Happy shot him and cleared his throat. "I asked Sylvester to hack into the cameras and get the footage, then used Walter's fancy image software to improve the quality. Sly was pretty tickled by everything, Walter not so much."
Happy groaned in exasperation, "So that was why Sly started getting on my case out of the blue."
"He was? What did he say? What did you say?" Toby perked up, but backed down immediately as Happy narrowed her eyes.
"I don't know what weird buddy-buddy thing you two got going on, but you get him to do your prodding for you one more time and the both of you can continue your little bromance in the hospital, understood?"
"Will you come visit me?"
Happy ignored him and turned on the phone's lock screen again. "You didn't have this yesterday though,"
"Hap I know I'm all kinds of messed up, but I'm nowhere near suicidal enough to publicly put us as a wallpaper before we were actually together. I changed it after you fell asleep last night," he paused, gauging her reaction. "So even if we don't stay over, I can still wake up to us."
She felt herself blush as she turned to smile at him, fighting against her instincts to keep eye contact even as the emotion behind his actions overwhelmed her. She honestly didn't know how to respond to his last sentence- not yet- so she fell back on nitpicking something she hoped wouldn't turn too intense too soon. "Publicly?"
"My personal laptop may or may not be us last Christmas."
She knew what he was probably talking about- the two of them in front of last year's tree, Toby's arm around her shoulder and her leaning into him more than she wanted to admit until today. Just before cleaning up the Rube-Goldberg, Paige had insisted that everybody take a picture with everyone else. Happy had grumbled about it, though inside she actually liked the idea of having a moment of everyone. Toby, on the other hand, made it no secret how excited he was to take a picture with Happy- so much so that she had to all but threaten him with the blowtorch to make him keep it together.
"I don't even want to know what you do with that," she scrunched her face in semi-mock disgust but laughed as Toby pressed a kiss to her nose.
"Who thought we'd be here just under a year later, huh?" He murmured, wrapping an arm around her shoulders and pulling her into him, mirroring themselves last year- only this time they were in her bed on their first morning together, sans clothes.
She hummed, content, as she handed his phone back to him. "Send it to me."
"Which one?" He asked, grinning. "It's a video Hap, there are quite a few pretty awesome screenshots. Or I can just send you the whole thing."
She nodded against him, feeling a slight blush creep up her cheeks.
"Gladly," Toby smirked, kissing her as he moved to get out of bed. "Breakfast?"
Toby looked uncertainly at the single tiny pancake Happy had on her plate, sitting in a pool of so much maple syrup it just looked sad. And drowned. "You sure that's all you're having, Hap?"
She shrugged casually as she held the pancake down in the syrup ocean with her spoon, making it absorb as much as it could. "You're lucky I'm having breakfast at all, I usually just go to the garage and rummage through whatever we have. And I don't need your fancy MD to tell me it's unhealthy, I just can't be bothered in the mornings," she added quickly as Toby tried to open his mouth in protest.
The two ate in comfortable silence, both individually trying to process everything that had happened over the past day. Toby, for one, was completely sold on the whole magic of Christmas thing now and forever- there was no other way to explain how he and Happy had gone from best friends to essentially strangers to now a real couple in just a few months.
Happy on the other hand was going through a decidedly more complicated and self-meditative thought process. She couldn't believe that after one and a half years of Toby, and to some extent Paige and the others, trying to get her to lower her shield, it took a random college kid to get her to finally open up and let in the good in her life that was waiting for her. (She would have given props to Sly too for his pep talk yesterday, but now that she knew he had way too much help, she decided to leave him largely uncredited for that.)
Just two weeks of letting down her shield had gotten her further that she had ever thought she would reach, and she knew that now with Toby by her side, she might just have a chance of feeling and expressing herself like a normal person.
She was so deep in her thoughts that she startled herself when she looked up to find Toby watching her intently, his gaze soft yet full of some intense, deep emotion in his eyes that she knew she wasn't open enough yet to recognize. It didn't seem the time for words, so she simply nodded up at him, questioning and bemused.
He smiled at her, that same one he had the whole time they were dancing, and after they had finally kissed again, after far too long, on that beach. There was more love and adoration in his eyes than she could ever have imagined, as he reached across the table to cover her hands with his, his thumbs brushing across her knuckles almost reverently as he continued to look gaze at her like she was an angel sent down from heaven just for him. Which, in his opinion, she was nothing short of.
She knew he loved her- he had told her repeatedly last night, as if all his actions over the past years weren't enough. She also knew she felt the same way, though she couldn't bring herself to say it just yet. Growing up, she either never heard it or heard it used only as a way to justify the 'disciplining' her foster parents would lash out at her and the other kids, and no matter how safe she felt in Toby, that childhood trauma needed time to recede.
The emotion in his gaze was so strong, as if he was staring so directly into her soul that she had to look down. Her lips curved into a smile though, despite her biting on them, and she found herself blushing again because, oh God, this was Toby she was with. Her best friend, the one she loved more than she had ever thought any human would be capable of, and now finally, finally, she could call him her boyfriend.
"You're okay, Hap?" Toby asked softly, breaking the silence. "This is what you want, right? I didn't mean to pressure you or-"
She flipped their hands so it was her holding his. "This is all I've ever wanted, Toby. It is for you too?"
He scoffed playfully, finally cracking the cloud of intense emotion around them. "Now what could have ever given that away?"
She laughed with him, settling into their usual banter, which had been painfully absent the past few months, and feeling all her tension melting away. This was Toby for heaven's sake, why should she ever have to worry about feeling too much when he was the only person she had ever felt so immeasurably safe with her whole life?
It seemed they had talked about everything and anything, although they both quietly skipped over the period between Cuba and Megan's passing- those were things to be talked about later, when they were truly comfortable enough together to talk about the pain.
Toby's phone buzzed with some Christmas offer by an app, and she remembered what she had wanted to ask him earlier. "By the way, what's up with the ringtone Doc?"
"Hmm?"
"Your alarm. Isn't the default one good enough?"
"But it's Constellations," he smiled absentmindedly at what seemed to be a distant memory but brought himself out of it when he saw Happy staring back at him blankly. "Oh right, you were asleep."
She raised an eyebrow at him. "Any settings on your phone you didn't change last night?"
Toby cocked his head in confusion for a moment before smiling and shaking his head. "This wasn't last night, it was… please don't kill me?" Happy merely gazed up at him expectantly so he took a deep breath and continued. "It was Bosnia, after we got separated from the rest of the team. It was dark, we were tired, and we didn't exactly know where to go anyway so we decided to rest for a while, remember?"
Happy just blinked at him, though he noticed her expression soften, and he went on. "You knocked out pretty fast, you were already sleeping in the truck and that ankle couldn't have helped, so I watched the stars for a while before I fell asleep too. The ringtone, it reminds me of what I'd long since accepted would be the only night I got to spend with you," he paused and smirked. "Until yesterday, of course."
Happy studied his face for a few moments and he held her gaze steadily, praying he hadn't said too much too soon and scared her. Eventually she stood up, walking around the table to sit on his lap, and he wrapped his arms around her, tucking her into him and pressing his lips to the top of her head.
"You know, what you said and did that day, it… it was probably the biggest catalyst in getting me to finally start admitting that I felt the same way."
Toby gently pulled her chin up to look in her eyes, the biggest smile she had ever seen on him practically splitting his face in half. "Really?"
She kept her gaze steadfastly downward though, as she replied, "What I didn't realize was that I had to admit it to myself first. I'm sorry I took so long to come around, Toby. I just…"
He leaned down to brush his lips against hers, so softly and gently that she almost didn't register that he did. "Hey, whatever it is, you take as long as you want, okay? You know I'll always be here, I'll always love you."
She nodded, still looking down especially after hearing the words that she felt too, but couldn't say herself just yet, so she did it in a way that didn't make her feel like she was exploding from the inside but hopefully still conveyed how she's in this just as deep as he is. "Thanks for always taking care of me, Doc."
"You already know I never give up," Toby grinned, picking up on her mirroring her words from last year, and playing along. "And especially now that we're together, I'm only going to keep taking better care of you."
He felt Happy's lips curled upward into a smile against the hollow of his collarbone. "Good."
[Yes I know the stars are a Melvester thing in canon, but it can also be Quintis's little secret right?]
[I use an iPhone and Constellations is one of the presets tones (it's really pretty imo hehe)]
Hope you guys liked it!
Please review if you can, it really makes my day :)